Snapshots From the Meeting

摘要

Hot time on the ol' Mars? The Curiosity rover has come across hints of chemical reactions on Mars that could have produced the organic "building blocks of life," but without any life. Jennifer Stern of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and fellow Curiosity team members reported that when Curiosity gradually heated windblown dust, the process produced molecular fragments at about 800°C. These appear to be cyanide (a carbon-nitrogen compound) and hydrogen cyanide. Another Curiosity team member, Andrew Steele of the Carnegie Institution of Science's Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C., reported the high-temperature release of the same molecules from another martian sample, a piece of the Tissint meteorite recently arrived from Mars. Using high-powered instruments in the lab, Steele could see that the nitrogen-containing compounds in Tissint likely formed when hot water interacted with martian rock. Another product of those reactions appears to have been organic matter.